Directory of Lost Causes

Some time back I wrote a few bits and pieces online about Thomas Ligotti's extended essay, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race. There was, for instance, a thread I started on Thomas Ligotti Online, and one or two blog posts. The essay is, ostensibly, one dealing with the origins and development of the horror genre. It also carries in it, quite explicitly, an argument, or plea for, the voluntary extinction of the human race, not for the sake of the planet, or anything like that, but simply in order to reduce human suffering. I suppose it could be called something like the case for genocidal euthanasia, but that would be misleading, since the main solution to the problem of human suffering that is put forward is simply not to perpetuate that suffering by procreation.

At the time I was ambivalent towards such a conclusion and the arguments upon which it was built, and I suppose I still am. However, I feel like making a certain qualification now to the remarks I made then.

In as far as anything ever is right or wrong, I think that Ligotti is probably right here. Or to put it another way, unless there is such a thing as mass-enlightenment, there will always be a sense of intolerable suffering to human existence, and the only way to end this will be through extinction. Some means of extinction will be gentler than and preferable to others.

To state that even more simply: Yes, I agree; it's always better not to be born.

That wasn't the qualification I wished to make, actually. But before I make my qualification, I should perhaps qualify my qualification by saying, I think I am far less consistent in my views than Ligotti, and likely to vacillate wildly.

At one point in the thread - I believe at more than one point - a poster calling himself 'The Yellow Jester', who is, in fact, Thomas Ligotti, if, in fact, such an entity exists, makes a distinction between emotional pessimism and cerebral pessimism, claiming as his own the latter:

In my own case, I can say that my pessimistic outlook is a matter of cerebral introspection and not "emotional thinking." No matter how I felt on an emotional level, I would still say, "It would be better not to be born." That is a constant which could only change should I become the victim of a brain tumor or something of the sort that would derange my thought processes.

At the time I noted, but did not quite appreciate this point. I'm not sure that any thinking can ever be free of emotion, or at least, of something like 'personality'. My own pessimism (not that I especially want to own it) I have always thought of as emotional, of consisting in a sensation that no one else would ever understand, because I could never put it into words. It was an almost physical entity, as reasonless as any object on Earth, like a ball of fear and loneliness inside me.

Now, however, I appreciate this point much better.

At the time that the essay came out, my strong reaction to it was probably due to the fact that it was 'too close to home'. Now my reaction to it is less powerful. It seems little different to any other accumulation of letters that I may read or ignore at will. For the past few months I have not had the intense depression that I suffered for many years before. I feel relatively detached now, and it seems to me that, no, you do not need to be depressed to think that it's better not to be born. You might even be enjoying an ice cream - as I believe Ligotti himself remarked - and still think that to be born is a curse that should not be visited upon anyone. I agree.

What, after all, is everybody looking forward to? What have they been looking foward to throughout history? Why has it taken so long without finding that thing - which cannot even be conceived - and people still go on and on reproducing? I do not understand.

In the meantime, Thomas Ligotti has joined H.P. Lovecraft, Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis in their riotous and strangely touching adventures with Korean sex symbols Jeon Ji-Hyun and Kim Hee Sun, iiiiin, Thomas Ligotti and the Strange Case of the Orange-Flavored Lifesavers.

The track by The Flobots on tonight's (Tuesday's) The Peter Harris Experience made me think of the band Cake for some reason. I haven't listened to their stuff for ages, but Fashion Nugget is an excellent album.



I was wondering what song of theirs to post. I was thinking of their cover of I Will Survive, but I realised that I don't like love songs much anymore. I'm too old for all that, as is the whole human race by now. The Distance is an excellent song, too, but, well that's kind of a love song, as well, even though it's less depressingly hopeful than I Will Survive. So I've plumped (plumbed?) for Frank Sinatra, which doesn't mention love anywhere, thank goodness, but gives us a cosmic view of things instead:

We know of an ancient radiation
That haunts dismembered constellations

It also seems to describe The Peter Harris Experience:

A faintly glimmering radio station...
Cobwebs fall on an old skipping record

And my life:

An old man sits collecting stamps
In a room all filled with Chinese lamps

It's positively Ligottian. I love it.

Amongst the presents I got for Christmas this year was a copy of Alan Moore's From Hell, a graphic novel based on the story or legend of that seminal serial killer, Jack the Ripper. I found it to be a fascinating piece of work and I have, all of a sudden, conceived an interest in the Ripper case. However, I don't intend to write here about From Hell or Jack the Ripper. I mention From Hell because a certain section of it reminded me of something I've been meaning to write for a very long time. In Chapter Nine, the officer investigating the case expresses his disgust at the ghouls who have gathered at the scene of one of the murders, some of them selling souvenirs, such as walking sticks:

"It's all a load of tom, shifting a few old walking sticks off the back of some poor murdered tart. And 'er barely cold. Makes me sick."

He goes on to say:

"Mark my words, in 'undred years there'll still be cunts like 'im, wrapping these killings up in supernatural twaddle. Making a living out of murder."

The work is heavily annotated in its appendix, giving a thorough account of Moore's research and other commentary. As part of his commentary on this page, Moore writes:

Abberline's eerily precognitive comments on page 2 are my own invention. They are also, in their way, a form of shamefaced apology from one currently making part of his living wrapping up miserable little killings in supernatural twaddle. Sometimes, after all you've done for them, your characters just turn on you.

This was just one more example of an idea that I had been toying with for over a year, to wit, the inbuilt hypocrisy of the writer. I say 'inbuilt', because how could Alan Moore have possibly written about Jack the Ripper and not been, at some point or other, a hypocrite?

But perhaps I should try to clarify my point with further examples. I'm not sure when the notion first occurred to me - and maybe, in different words, it was actually years and years ago - so I won't attempt to put these examples in chronological order. However, before coming across this little detail in From Hell, I was thinking of starting this piece with a quote from Thomas Ligotti, if I could find it. As a matter of fact, I can't find it, but it was along the lines of, "There is no literary voice for depression". At the time I thought this a strange thing to say. After all, aren't a great many writers somewhat depressive, and does this not influence their writing? People are always saying this or that writer is depressing. However, I feel that I have come to understand what Ligotti means. However much a writer might wish to express depression, what he or she ends up expressing is fascination, or something else of the sort. Writing cannot reproduce the feeling of depression. As Ligotti says in another interview (or possibly the same one), "Literature is entertainment or it is nothing". If the reader is not feeling, in some way, entertained, then he or she will simply stop reading. And since depression is not entertaining as it is actually experienced, there is no literary voice for depression.

Well, that's my second example now, but I have many, many others, which I hope will display the many sides of this concept.

For instance, I remember thinking about the hypocrisy of the writer quite consciously whilst reading John Wyndham's The Day of the Triffids. I had long meant to, but I was doing it partially to prepare myself mentally for the coming armageddon. I know, it sounds ridiculous, and perhaps this motive helped to highlight for me the aspect of inbuilt hypocrisy. Because, if Mr Wyndham were really contemplating the apocalypse, would he sit down in his study and tap away leisurely at his typewriter to write a book about it, which he then published commercially, so that readers like myself could sit in the comfort of their own homes and pass away a pleasant few hours dreaming about the end of civilisation?

Perhaps the quintessential example of the inbuilt hypocrisy of writers, however, comes in the form of a jisei. A jisei is a kind of Japanese poem - often, but not always a haiku - that was written when the subject knew that he or she was going to die. It was a kind of farewell to the world, and there are many left to us from famous Japanese poets, Buddhist monks and so on.

The poem in question is by someone called Toko, who lived from 1710 to 1795:

Jisei to wa
Sunawachi mayoi
Tada Shinan.

Death poems
are mere delusion -
Death is death.

Hmmm. This begs the question, if death poems are mere delusion, or, as it says in the original, "Jisei are, basically, indecision, if you're going to die, die", then why the hell did he bother to write one? Well, because he really wanted to express the idea of how stupid and futile it is to express anything. We have here the same kind of logical contradiction to be found in a statement like, "Everything I say is a lie". Star Trek fans should be familiar with that one.

I remember once - and I've never been able to track down who this was or what it was all about - many years ago, I saw a trailer on television for a programme about someone (a scientist, I believe), who had come up with a theory that actually we don't exist. Great, I thought, if we don't exist, why are you bothering to tell us? I'm serious.

The examples of this hypocrisy are endless. How about this one, which is, inevitably, from the man himself, Morrissey, part of a song called Reader Meet Author?

You don't know a thing about their lives
They live where you wouldn't dare to drive
You shake as you think of how they sleep
But you write as if you all lie side by side

This is one hypocritical writer writing hypocritically about the hypocrisy of other writers. And I am a hypocritical writer writing hypocritically about the hypocrisy of another writer writing hypocritically about the hypocrisy of another writer.

Phew!

And it's not only the writers who are hypocritical. What about the readers? Aren't they basically in the same boat? They want the writers to give them something real, or something that feels real, but they don't want to know how this is done. And if they suddenly find themselves to be the writer's subject matter, and the result is not flattering, well, suddenly what the writer does is beyond the pale.

In this connection, I was recently sent a copy of a book in which I have an essay. That book is Horror Quarterly. My essay was on Japanese horror, and dealt in part with the questions of voyeurism and sadism in art. Here is a quote therefrom:

One day a friend of mine, who has since disappeared into the depths of the comic-book world, turned to me and said, "If you're not the audience, and you're not the cameraman, and you're not the assailant, you must be the victim." I have never been able to forget it. Shakespeare wrote grandly that all the world is a stage. Ladies and gentlemen, I tell you that the world is, in fact, nothing more than a vast snuff film. We are all of us, to a greater or lesser extent, assailants, and there's one thing else that's sure, we none of us get through this life without also being victims. Sadistic art, exploitation, fake snuff films - if these things sicken us then it must be because they confront us with this obscene and horrifying truth.

I suppose what I'm trying to get at by quoting myself here is that maybe this hypocrisy goes beyond writing and writers, and is a fundamental part of what it means to be human. To make my point clearer, let me ask the question, how could a writer avoid hypocrisy? Presumably the writer is trying to capture something real - a kind of raw experience of the basic meaningless universe in all its glory. Or, if they're more morally inclined, well, they might be searching for a different kind of truth, but, nonetheless, something 'real'. And this is what I do, too. However, just as light dispells darkness wherever it goes, so does language dispell meaninglessness. It cannot help but be a projection onto reality. If someone says, "Life is meaningless" they have created the kind of logical contradiction mentioned above. Meaning is inherent in language, and the effort of expression is nothing if not an attempt to create a meaning, even if that created meaning is that "life is meaningless". It seems to me that, contrary to what many people seem to think, it is not a meaningful life that is hard or impossible to come by, but a meaningless life. The writer strives for that meaningless reality - and the credibility that comes with it - again and again; again and again she fails. She ends up with mere meaning - in other words, hypocrisy. It's inbuilt.

This begs the question, is that meaningless reality anywhere out there at all?

Ultimately, of course, I don't have the answer. However, I will leave you with a few thoughts in connection with my own hypocritical writing. I find that the writing process is, for me, one in which synchronicity plays a large part. Call me a flakey crackpot if you will - and I probably am, so who cares? - but that's the truth of the matter. And in keeping with that truth, I have found this idea of the hypocrisy of writers worming its way into the novel on which I am currently working, Domesday Afternoon. Everything I'm living seems to go into the mix, as if I'm some sort of synchronicity blender. Anyway, here's an excerpt from a recent passage in the novel:

Sincerity. Reality. How far off these destinations still seem. If I could be single and alone, without mirrors, but maybe, after all, the human mind will always erect the mirrors of self-examination that keep us from being real and sincere. Sometimes, indeed, it seems to me that to write at all is to be a hypocrite. And to write, in the end, is no different than to think.

I tried to address this to no one, but I must confess that something looms and casts a shadow on these pages, so that, even in my greatest loneliness, I cannot help but address... address... someone or something. You, whoever you are, or perhaps myself, or God, or some combination of these three. In any case, I address.

So, it seems, the inbuilt hypocrisy of the writer is the closest I have come to proving the existence of God.

(Irony engine disengaged.)